Getting Off Benefits

or Escaping Poverty? Using corpora to investigate how the press represented

poverty during the 2015 UK general election campaign. Journal of Corpora and

Discourse Studies, 2:X–X

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the representation of poverty in nine national British newspapers during the 2015 UK general election campaign. A framework combining the qualitative approach of Critical Discourse Analysis with corpus-based techniques is used to address the following questions: which themes did the press foreground and background a) when poverty was mentioned explicitly, b) when it was referred to in terms of benefit claiming and c) when the two were mentioned together in the same article? The main claim of this study is that explicit discussion of poverty in the press was less frequent than the discussion of benefit claiming, and appeared to be mostly detached from the immediate context of the general election. This seemed to reflect a lack of attention paid to poverty in political discourse. Poverty was presented both as a reality without tangible causes and a common enemy that must be fought by an undefined entity. On the other hand, the welfare state (particularly benefit claiming) was presented as a burden that creates dependency; therefore, welfare reform and the reduction of expenditure on benefits — central to the general election campaign — were posed as a necessity for the reduction of debt. It is argued the separation of poverty and benefit claiming into two parallel debates, with only a small minority of articles discussing them in conjunction, allowed the press to sustain two incongruous messages at the same time: the need to both cut benefits and end poverty. It was only in the minority of articles that discussed poverty together with benefit claiming that a more visible counter-discourse surfaced, with more emphasis on the structural causes of poverty, the inadequateness of the benefit system and the positives of supporting people through the welfare state.

KEYWORDS corpus linguistics; critical discourse

analysis; media discourse; welfare; poverty

CONTACT Alessia Tranchese, School of Languages and Area Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth PO1 2DZ, United Kingdom. [email protected]

DOI 10.18573/jcads.9

ORCID 0000-0002-3589-330X

ISSUE DOI 10.18573/jcads.v2i1

LICENSE © The authors. Available under the terms of the CC-BY 4.0 license

Manuscript accepted 2019-05-17

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3589-330X
http://dx.doi.org/10.18573/jcads.v2i1
http://dx.doi.org/10.18573/jcads.9
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
2 Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies 2

Getting Off Benefits or Escaping Poverty?Using corpora to investigate how the press represented poverty during the 2015 UK general election campaign

Alessia Tranchese University of Portsmouth

1. Introduction There is no uncontentious definition of poverty, as its boundaries have shifted over time (Spicker, 2007). For example, in the 1970s, Townsend (1979) argued that poverty was more about the inability of people to participate actively in society than it was about a shortage of income. Echoing Townsend, Ferragina et al. (2013, p.37) argued that there exists a connection between income and participation, and that this connection should not be neglected in debates concerning appropriate ways of measuring poverty. More re- cently, in Section 7 of the Welfare Reform and Work Act (2016) the UK Conservative government replaced income-based measures of child poverty with measures of educa- tional attainment gaps and worklessness. However, in the absence of a universal defini- tion of poverty, more tangible manifestations have often been chosen as indicators. These include measures of income and material deprivation, such as low income, lack of access to essential goods and services, and benefit claiming (Spicker, 2002).

Among these three main indicators of poverty, it is particularly the accuracy of media coverage of benefit claiming that has often been denounced as problematic. For example, in 2011, at the height of the welfare reform, which made changes to the benefits offered within the British social security system, the Department for Work and Pensions Select Committee (2011, p. 3) defined media coverage of incapacity and disability benefits as ‘of- ten irresponsible and inaccurate’ with ‘pejorative language’ used by ‘some sections of the press […] when referring to benefit claimants’. Similarly, the Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press (2012, p. 684) found this coverage to be ‘biased’.